Latest News - Page 54

Xbox is currently going through a major restructuring phase as the publisher seeks to "reset" the brand to better position it for the future. Unsurprisingly, a part of this restructuring is the closure of studios, but what was surprising was the studios that were selected.

A new report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier has revealed that Microsoft has decided to close down major game development studios as part of Xbox's restructuring and its expenditure control measures. The studios selected are Compulsion Games, developer of South of Midnight; Double Fine, developer of Brütal Legend and Psychonauts; and, most shockingly, Ninja Theory, developer of the Hellblade franchise. The closure of Ninja Theory is particularly shocking as it was only eight days ago that Senua, Ninja Theory's upcoming Hellblade game, was showcased at the Xbox Game Showcase.

The studio's closure has cast a shadow of concern over Senua, as many are now wondering about the title's fate. Does it get canceled entirely? Or will it release as intended? Notably, Microsoft and Xbox haven't officially canceled Senua, meaning on paper the game is still on track to release sometime in 2027. What is unprecedented here, and will be an unwanted record for Xbox to hold, is the time between a AAA game's first public reveal and the announcement or reported decision to shut down the developer behind that upcoming title. Just eight days.

At Computex 2026, the biggest announcement, from a consumer technology perspective, was RTX Spark. NVIDIA's all-in-one SoC that pairs its Arm-based Grace CPU technology (developed in partnership with MediaTek) with RTX Blackwell graphics. With the RTX Spark launch on track for later this year, these chips are set to power a range of premium laptops and mini PCs, with a focus on powerful local AI, creative workloads, and ray-traced PC gaming.

With its Arm CPU cores, RTX Spark devices will ship with an overhauled and optimized version of Windows on Arm, which NVIDIA has been working with Microsoft closely on. However, RTX Spark isn't the only all-in-one chip with NVIDIA graphics that's set to compete with the likes of Ryzen AI, as Intel is reportedly building a new line of x86 CPUs with integrated GeForce RTX graphics. Although details are scarce, both NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan have confirmed this collaboration last year.

According to a new report over at VideoCardz, citing a former tech site editor, Erdi Özüağ, who has apparently seen Intel's current roadmap, Intel's first x86 processors with integrated RTX graphics are on track for a Q1 2028 release. And with that a potential announcement and reveal could take place at CES 2028.

AMD's FSR 4.1 is coming to more Radeon gamers, starting with desktop RDNA 3 support arriving next month, which brings the vastly superior AI-powered version of FSR to the Radeon RX 7000 Series of graphics cards. Up until now the technology has been exclusive to the latest RDNA 4 generation and cards like the Radeon RX 9070 XT, but that's about to change.

Sitting down with AMD's Chief Software Officer, Andrej Zdravkovic, and AMD's Senior Director of Software, Terry Makedon, TechPowerUp has learned that the version of FSR 4.1 that will debut for RDNA 3 GPUs will arrive with no quality loss when it comes to the final image displayed on screen. This is good news because AMD has had to rebuild and optimize FSR 4.1 to run on RDNA 3's first-gen AI hardware, which uses INT8 data, rather than the more efficient FP8 used on RDNA 4, which served as the basis for FSR 4.

According to the report, AMD has had to modify the underlying model to support RDNA 3, but the end result for image quality will be the same. For gamers with cards like the Radeon RX 7800 XT and previous-gen flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX, FSR 4.1 support will unlock a new level of performance and image fidelity, especially when gaming at higher resolutions. As for bringing FSR 4.1 to RDNA 2 and GPUs from the Radeon RX 6000 Series, it's a lot more complicated, hence the 2027 release window.

A US-based AI startup is making bold claims against NVIDIA's most advanced hardware. Tensordyne has announced the successful tape-out of its Napier chip, a 3nm AI accelerator built on TSMC's process in collaboration with Broadcom and HPE's Juniper Networks. The company is already reporting over $200 million in projected system demand.

The Napier chip packs 138 billion transistors, 2.1 petaflops of Dense FP8 compute, 144GB of HBM3E memory, 256MB of SRAM, and runs at 300W TDP. The architectural hook is a proprietary logarithmic mathematics method that replaces numerous multiplication operations with simpler addition-based computation. Because adders are smaller and more power-efficient than multipliers, Tensordyne claims this frees up significantly more silicon area for SRAM, which it says gives Napier five times as much on-chip SRAM as NVIDIA's Blackwell.

The full rack configuration, called the TDN72, houses 288 Napier chips across four pods of 72 chips each. The complete rack delivers 608 petaflops of FP8 compute, 42TB of HBM3E memory, and operates within a 120kW power envelope, all while being fully air-cooled.

A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System just sold for $3 million at Heritage Auctions, which called it the "finest known copy" and "the Holy Grail of video game collecting." The previous record was a $2 million private sale in 2021 for another copy of the same game.

The copy was discovered only a few months ago, still sealed inside a brand-new NES Control Deck console bundle that had sat completely untouched since 1986. The console and game hail from the Los Angeles test-market period, one of Nintendo's earliest US expansion efforts, and the bundle had never been opened.

The cartridge itself is from Super Mario Bros. ' second production run, released in early 1986, with a distinctive gloss sticker seal that replaced the short-lived matte sticker used on the original 1985 launch copies. According to Heritage Auctions, only three sealed second-production copies with this gloss sticker format are known to exist, and this one carries the highest PSA 9.6 A++ grade. It also bears a cardboard hang tab that was discontinued in 1987. That means it is in near mint condition. The other two known examples are graded at VGA 80 and Wata 9.4 A++.

An independent developer has released an Xbox 360 version of GoldenEye 007 on GitHub, which the developer claims offers native PC support and "no emulator".

The developer states that the PC version of GoldenEye was completely recompiled in C++ using the ReXGlueSDK. By doing this, the developer states GoldenEye Recomp v1.0 doesn't require an emulator as "the game runs as a real native executable". Additionally, the new version of GoldenEye supports modern Windows controllers, online multiplayer, various resolutions and aspect ratios, visual filters, and a stable 60FPS framerate.

For gamers who didn't grow up playing GoldenEye, the Nintendo / Rare title was pivotal in the history of video games, particularly first-person-shooter titles, as its popularity indicated that FPS titles also had a home on consoles, which at the time FPS games were thought to be PC exclusive. While this is all well and good, the developer of the recompilation explains the repository doesn't actually contain the game files or a game code, only the source that wraps the game.

OneXPlayer has launched its X2 Mini Pro on Indiegogo, listing the base configuration at $2,399. This is more than double the price of the Lenovo Legion Go 2. Upgrading to 64GB of RAM increases the price to $2,699, while the 64GB RAM with 2TB storage configuration lands at $2,799. A Liquid-Cooled Edition that connects to an external Frost Bay liquid-cooling dock starts at $2,459.99 and tops out at $2,859.99 for the highest configuration.

And that asking price doesn't get you the power the company initially promised. OneXPlayer originally teased the X2 Mini Pro with AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395, a 16-core, 32-thread Strix Halo APU with 64MB of L3 cache and boost clocks up to 5.1GHz. The product page now lists the Ryzen AI Max+ 388 instead, which cuts that down to 8 cores, 16 threads, 32MB of L3 cache, and a 5.0GHz boost clock.

Both chips share the same Radeon 8060S integrated graphics with a 55W default TDP and a configurable range of 45W to 120W, so gaming performance should be largely similar. But going from 16 cores to 8 without any announcement or explanation has not sat well with early backers.

AMD is gearing up to release a pair of Ryzen 3000 series 'Picasso' CPUs. But they aren't based on the Zen 4 or even Zen 3 or 2 architectures, but the Zen+ architecture that was released back in 2019. The two chips come with Radeon Vega graphics and are being targeted at entry-level laptops with the FP5 socket. As they are FP5 chips, they don't have retail pricing, and are clearly being released to support OEMs. It's safe to say they will be far cheaper than AMD's Ryzen AI 400 chips.

The Ryzen 3 3100U is a very basic chip by modern standards. It's a dual-core chip without hyperthreading. It has a boost clock of 3.2GHz, 4MB of L3 cache, and a default 15W TDP. It has an 8-core Vega 8 GPU which was actually highly regarded back in its day. Suffice to say this is a chip that won't win any benchmark races in 2026 and it won't be suitable for anything outside of basic Windows tasks. But, it's a well-established architecture that will be easy for OEMs to incorporate into 'new' designs.

The second chip is more powerful. The Ryzen 5 3501U is a 4-core, 8-thread design with a boost clock of up to 3.7GHz. It has the same Vega 8 graphics as the 3100U, but its higher thread count makes it more suitable for multitasking.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has penned a lengthy X post detailing Microsoft's position on AI models and what companies of the future should value most in AI.

Interestingly, Nadella argues that Microsoft is pushing for a multi-model strategy, and that its Foundry supports different models, agent frameworks, and other Frontier Tuning. Nadella outlines how businesses should operate in an increasingly AI-driven economy and says a business shouldn't adopt a single AI model and build its entire business around it. Instead, Nadella argues that companies should build their own learning systems on top of multiple models, combining employees' expertise with AI capabilities.

Nadella describes this setup as a balancing act between "human capital" and "token capital," with human capital being knowledge, judgment, relationships, ingenuity, and pattern recognition, while token capital represents the AI capabilities a company can develop using its internal knowledge, workflows, and accumulated experience.

Anthropic, the creator of Claude, Claude Code, and the now-banned Fable 5 model, is facing a class-action lawsuit that alleges it misled subscribers about plan usage limits.

The suit specifically states that subscribers of the two highest-paid tiers, Max 5x and Max 20x, have usage limits below what the company advertises. The suit, filed by Karl Khan in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, claims Claude's actual session limits for the Max 20x plan are about "just six to eight times the usage of Pro," with the Max 5x plan being "just three-and-a-half times the usage of Pro.

Khan writes in the lawsuit that, after upgrading through Anthropic's subscription tiers,, he noticed a discrepancy between what Anthropic advertised and what he was able to achieve with his weekly data allocation. The filing goes on to argue that Anthropic has intentionally made information around its usage limits ambiguous, with the suit claiming Anthropic's website, "is a black box, without any meaningful description of how usage is calculated." It adds that Anthropic doesn't clearly define what constitutes a single session.

If Sony hadn't bought Bungie years ago, then there's a good chance that the studio wouldn't be here today.

New reports indicate that Bungie may have been on the verge of shutting down prior to Sony's acquisition in 2022. The info comes via Bungie's former well-liked community manager Liana Ruppert, who says that the studio was in dire financial straits prior to the buyout. Sony essentially made an "emergency acquisition," Ruppert says.

"Bungie was below the red line before the Sony acquisition. If it wasn't acquired right then, the studio was very close to shutting its doors at the very least on Destiny. It was an emergency acquisition," she said on Twitter.

PlayStation's previous head of indies Shuhei Yoshida openly shares his thoughts about the future of Xbox, and it apparently looks a lot like Windows.

Last year, well-respected industry figure Shuhei Yoshida left Sony after 35 years serving PlayStation. Now he's more of a consultant-for-hire, helping indie game studios and going around to various events. This is a seasoned former executive who has likely spent a lot of time with sensitive data and info that isn't widely shared or known, so when he makes predictions, it's worth taking into consideration.

Yoshida recently shared his thoughts about the ongoing Xbox drama on Twitter, saying that he essentially believes the Xbox games unit could be absorbed by Windows. Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma has issued a daunting decree that will "reset the business" after the group delivers a dismal 3% profit margin throughout this year.

Compulsion Games will reportedly shut down as Microsoft adjusts the Xbox business, and othet studios may be affected including Double Fine and even Ninja Theory.

Microsoft has decided to close down key studios who are now trying to negotiate their independence, sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier. These groups include more orbital boutique studios like Compulsion Games, Ninja Theory, and Double Fine. Other studios may be affected.

The group's publishing parent, Xbox Game Studios, has also lost its leader: XGS chief Craig Duncan has also left Microsoft after 15 years and his second-in-command, chief of staff Louise O'Connor is also out.

XBOX is currently undergoing major restructuring as the company intends to reset the XBOX brand, and seemingly part of those sweeping changes is a new purchasing option for players.

The new purchasing option was discovered by redphx and shared in an X post, which shows the backend of Xbox's website and code for what is called "break payments up over weeks or months," and next to PayPal, "PayPal Pay Later". Another giveaway is the "Pay in 4 interest-free, bi-weekly payments, or spread payments up to 24 months." While each of these is pretty self-explanatory, the idea is players will be able to get access to Xbox products right away and then slowly pay them off, similar to AfterPay, but directly with Xbox.

Notably, XBOX hasn't announced anything about this new purchasing option, meaning it's subject to change, and there is a good chance XBOX will make changes to the payment structure. In the event that XBOX actually releases this as a payment option, on a surface level, I think it could be quite a big hit, especially if it included hardware as well.

AMD's senior marketing director Saša Marinković went on X to brag about the company's domination on Amazon's best-sellers CPU list, sharing a screenshot showing the top 15 spots (at the time of publishing) were held entirely by Ryzen CPUs.

AMD has perpetually grown its domination on Amazon's best sellers page over the past several years. AMD began to take off in this "metric" during the Zen 2 era where its CPUs started to take over the top five spots in Amazon's best sellers list on an almost regular basis. More recently, the top 10 spots have regularly been held by various Ryzen CPUs - new and old.

Currently, the lead is even greater with the top 16 places on Amazon's best sellers list consisting of Zen 3, Zen 4, and Zen 5 parts. The only exception is the inclusion of a Thermal Grizzly AM5 contact frame that is taking up one of the slots. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D unsurprisingly sits in first place, but contrarily, the Ryzen 5 5500 takes up the second spot, showing sky-high consumer demand for previous generation budget CPUs amidst the outgoing memory shortage. Critically, the Ryzen 5 5500 can use DDR4 memory, which is cheaper than DDR5 and more readily available. Positions three through ten are held by the Ryzen 5 9600X, Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Ryzen 7 5800XT, Ryzen 9 9950X3D, Ryzen 9 5900XT, Ryzen 5 7600X, Ryzen 5 5600, and Ryzen 7 7700X. The new Ryzen 7 9850X3D sits in 16th despite being a faster version of the 9800X3D for an extra $40.

A modified Unitree G1 humanoid robot named Pemba has become the first of its kind to summit a 20,341-foot volcano in Ecuador, a critical step toward its next target: Mount Everest.

The robot, which climbed Ecuador's Chimborazo volcano, navigated the 16-hour trek autonomously along sections with an incline of less than 30 degrees. It was carried up the steeper portions but still completed the climb, demonstrating its engineering capabilities and its ability to operate in extreme conditions. The robot was equipped with special booties and a warming jacket to withstand the harsh, snowy environment.

The climb was organized by French engineer Pablo to test humanoid robots in remote, high-altitude environments. The goal is to develop machines that can assist with environmental monitoring, particularly in areas, climates, or terrain that is too challenging, difficult, or time-consuming for humans. Examples include the Amazon rainforest and the Himalayas. While humanoid robots still have a long way to go, this climb is a significant milestone in proving their potential for real-world applications.

Xbox has lost another leader among its ranks as the group prepares to "reset the business."

Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan has left the organization as Microsoft reportedly prepares to make sweeping cuts to the division. Sources tell The Game Business that Duncan has stepped down from his position, and that Xbox Game Studios chief of staff Louise O'Connor is also leaving.

Duncan has been with Xbox for 15 years, originally serving as the boss of Rare, the UK game studio behind iconic hits like Donkey Kong Country, Banjo Kazooie and GoldenEye.

Apple's first foldable device, rumored to be called the iPhone Fold/Ultra, has been in development behind the scenes for many years now and will use panels from Samsung Display.

Previous reports from insiders citing people familiar with Apple's supply chain for its upcoming foldable stated that Apple set extremely strict requirements for the design of the foldable iPhone, including solving the crease problem across all foldable devices - Apple requires a crease-less iPhone. That stipulation in itself is a major engineering challenge that involves several smaller, yet equally complex engineering problems, such as designing a hinge that enables creaseless folding and a display that doesn't crease when folded.

A report from an Asian publication citing two Apple supply chain partners claims the iPhone Ultra won't hit stores in early 2027 due to "scheduling factors." These comments came from Largan Precision's CEO, Adam Lin, who added that the delays may result in Apple's upcoming device being "early next year".

GEEKOM has once again partnered with TweakTown, this time to offer an incredible deal on its impressive GEEKOM A8 Mini PC as the company kicks off its massive Summer Sale. With its Ryzen 7 8745HS processor with integrated Radeon 780M graphics, 16GB of fast DDR5 memory, and 1TB of SSD storage, you can get 20% off this sleek ultra-compact PC at checkout when you use the special promo code found below.

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A new report has shed light on the escalating situation between Anthropic, the US government, and the company's latest AI model, which was only available for 3 days before being forcibly taken offline by the Trump administration.

Anthropic released Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 on Tuesday, which are the company's first "Mythos-class" models, seemingly classified as bleeding-edge AI. These Mythos-class models are straight-jacketed versions of the Mythos Preview that Anthropic showcased in April, and announced was too dangerous to be released to the public due to its power to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Essentially, Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 are versions of Mythos Preview with safety rails designed to prevent the model from being used in nefarious ways, such as generating malicious code.

These models with the built-in safety rails were banned by the US government over national security concerns, as authorities stated they had learned the Mythos-class models had been jailbroken. Reports state that Amazon, along with five other companies, contacted the White House and raised potential security concerns about Anthropic's Mythos-class models; as a result, the White House issued an export ban preventing non-US nationals from using them. Since that task was beyond Anthropic's capabilities, the AI company disabled the models for everyone.